Wind turbine systems of the state of the art are usually controlled by on-board wind turbine control systems that comprise software and hardware components. When operating a large number of wind turbines, maintaining an individual software component (computer program) for each of the wind turbines produces substantial technical effort and is a potential source of error.
In order to avoid such a maintaining of a plurality of individual computer programs for the wind turbines, it is known to use the same computer program on each of the wind turbines, and configure the computer program individually for each wind turbine so that program execution takes place differently on the different wind turbines. Thus, only one computer program needs to be maintained, and the technical effort is substantially reduced.
Typically, each wind turbine must then be provided with a file of configuration data describing the type of the wind turbine to which the configuration file and computer program belongs, and all of the constituent parts of the wind turbine.
However, in order to establish that the wind turbines are always correctly controlled and monitored by the on-board wind turbine control system, the configuration file must always contain correct and sufficient information about the wind turbine configuration.
In practice, the contents of such configuration files can accidentally be modified during service of the turbine.
US patent application publications US 2005/0090937 A1 and US 2002/0029097 A1 propose systems in which the configuration of a wind farm and its turbines is stored on a computer system that is local to the wind farm. However, these systems do not provide means for ensuring that the stored configuration is valid. U.S. Pat. No. 6,035,423 describes a method for updating antivirus signature files on a plurality of client computers.